Fast Forward Your Fork
Since forking a repository is so easy on GitHub, a number of people tend to do it thinking they want to play with the source, but then never actually push…
Since forking a repository is so easy on GitHub, a number of people tend to do it thinking they want to play with the source, but then never actually push back into their fork. Meanwhile, development continues on the main branch, and it’s a little annoying to have to add them as a remote and merge in order to get back up to date. So, we’ve added a new button to your repository details that will show up if you forked a project, didn’t push to it, and the source repo has moved on:

If you click on ‘Fast Forward’, it will move all your branches up to wherever the repository you originally forked from now is. Now all of those of you who forked Rails months ago and never did anything with it and are thinking of trying again, go forth and Fast Forward.
Written by
Related posts
GitHub availability report: January 2026
In January, we experienced two incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.
Pick your agent: Use Claude and Codex on Agent HQ
Claude by Anthropic and OpenAI Codex are now available in public preview on GitHub and VS Code with a Copilot Pro+ or Copilot Enterprise subscription. Here’s what you need to know and how to get started today.
What the fastest-growing tools reveal about how software is being built
What languages are growing fastest, and why? What about the projects that people are interested in the most? Where are new developers cutting their teeth? Let’s take a look at Octoverse data to find out.